This is a good time of year for planting perennials in my part of the world. We are past the frizzle days of high summer, but still enough time left for things to establish before going into winter dormancy, and be really ready to take off in spring. We are also coming into what is traditionally our wet season, though in this La Ninã year, that really isn’t a factor.…
Capsicums are the feature crop out of my garden this week, and they are so much in season that even if you aren’t growing them, you should be able to get beautiful local ones at Farmers Markets.
The mice have been a pain this last year. They got all my pea and snow pea seeds for the first planting last autumn, and all my corn seeds for the first couple of plantings this year. With most plagues of anything, the populations of predators will immediately start building up in response to the increased food source, but the higher up the food chain you go, the slower the…
We picked the first of the new season’s macadamias yesterday. It’s a bit earlier than usual, but the warm wet weather seems to have been bringing them on, and they are starting to drop and be got by the creatures. I don’t mind the creatures getting some of them. Because they are a native to this region, we’ve included seedling trees in all the riparian native plantings. But we also…
The Tuesday Night Vego Challenge this week had to feature snake beans. Now I have them coming on, the poor old Blue Lakes and Purple Kings have dropped right out of favour, left to mature for seed for storing. Snake beans are more tropical than most bean varieties, adapted to the tropical summer monsoon belt. They like hot wet weather.
Have you noticed yet that I have a certain amount of experience with zucchini recipes? There is a Marge Piercy poem that I think perfectly sums up zucchini: Attack of the Squash People. I thought I had learned the lesson: One, no more than two, zucchini each planting break.
This is the second in the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge, and already I’m cheating a little bit. Making this easily within the half hour relies on you having fresh or already cooked beans and bread rolls on hand. I’m starting to harvest beans for shelling now. By the end of the summer I’ll have a big jar full of each kind for slow cooking over the winter.